Ensure that all employees and associates are armed with the same applications and tools to represent your brand and serve your customers in innovative ways. Deliver either full desktops or just the apps to any device—including in-store workstations, low-cost thin clients, PCs, Macs, and tablets. Citrix enables a real-time experience for employees and associates that is as good as or better than a local application.

A differentiated customer experience is one of the last true competitive advantages for brick-and-mortar stores. Citrix solutions for retail increase employee productivity, improve in-store connectivity, and enable customers to shop in new ways, such as integrating the internet into the in-store experience.

Done strategically and with clear governance, moving store systems to the cloud enables retailers to monitor and improve the performance of people and processes. By moving to the cloud using Citrix Cloud Services, organizational silos can be broken down and outdated legacy or proprietary retail applications can be integrated and made available to everyone. Key functions such as inventory, shipping and point of sale (POS) can be viewed from a single lens through one platform. The benefits are twofold: leaders get a more cohesive view of the business and associates can access the customer information they need more quickly and efficiently. Process flow improves, and—because key information about customers and their transaction patterns is more readily available—customer service becomes measurably better.

Retailers struggle with protecting their IT environments from cyber-crime. Not only must they comply with Payment Card Industry (PCI) mandates, but also, they must constantly adapt to more sophisticated cyber criminals and ever-increasing volumes of data. Unified commerce and mobile-friendly environments bring a mixed bag—more tools to serve customers and more risks to mitigate.

Even with users halfway around the world, the latency is almost unnoticeable. That’s astonishing. Better yet, I’m running a Citrix implementation for 100 users with just one system administrator here in Emeryville.